Competitive pressures are as fierce today as ever, and companies are looking at how they can focus more on their core business proposition. Outsourcing common business services -- such as booking travel arrangements and ordering office supplies -- rather than creating and maintaining separate IT infrastructures saves time and money. However, as a corporate consumer of these services, you want to make sure that your outsourced travel solution can be easily and affordably customized to suit your specific company needs -- and that you aren't left with an off-the-shelf solution that inhibits the way you do business.

In this series of articles, find out how you can create customizable applications by combining business processes with business rules technologies, enforce security and privacy constraints when dealing with external partners, build service-oriented architectures, integrate Web-based user interfaces into your intranets, and implement application support for pay-as-you go billing models. To demonstrate these capabilities, follow along with a scenario in which an online travel agency brokers services between travel industry service providers (such as airlines and car rental agencies) and corporate service consumers who have outsourced their travel needs to the online travel agency.

To enable the mediated exchange solution, the online travel agency collaborates with corporate service consumers and service providers to complete the following stages:

• Develop customizable business processes and travel policy templates that can be exposed to service providers as value-added service.
• Implement a flexible and dynamic SOA infrastructure that allows for rapid integration of service provider services.
• Implement a metering capability that can be used as a basis for a pay-as-you-go billing model.
• Develop and expose a Web-based UI that lets service consumers readily integrate the travel application into their employee intranet.
• Enable a flexible security infrastructure that allows for seamless and secure communication across the value chain, enforces privacy concerns, and minimizes identity-management expenses for all parties.

This series helps you systematically implement the mediated exchange solution one step at a time. And you'll learn the implementation strategies and tips behind each of the previously mentioned stages.

Link to project implementation.